Sourland

by Joyce Carol Oates

  DEATH CERTIFICATE

  “God damn.”

  It was more a sob than a curse. Somewhere overhead, deranged bells were ringing. She’d pushed open the heavy door of the county courthouse and descended into a dimly-lit and soupy-aired ground-floor corridor like a tunnel only to discover that the office of the county clerk of records was locked and on the door a snotty notice WILL RETURN AT 1 P.M.

  Noon! She’d arrived at noon.

  In exasperation she rattled the doorknob. She wasn’t one to resist a gesture only because it is futile.

  She had come to receive from the Chautauqua County Office of Records, for a fee of five dollars, a facsimile of a death certificate. She had no personal wish for this document, the very thought of which made her wince, and her eyes shift in the rapid-eye-movement of the deepest phase of sleep, but lawyers were insisting she must have it and so she’d driven three hours, forty minutes halfway across the massive state of New York and now she was herself in a state somewhere between manic and wounded. She was wearing stylish, very dark sunglasses that made her resemble a sleek-sexy insect not entirely steady in the upright position, in high-heeled summer sandals. She was wearing a white cord skirt that showed much of her sleek-sexy thighs and a flame-red top showing, at the midriff, a sliver of creamy skin. Her legs (calves, thighs) were sturdy and supple and her upper arms had a meaty firmness, yet. Beneath her likeness she could see the caption Would you guess thirty-eight?

  Though since the death, the awful death, eleven days before, that had come at the worst possible time in her life, she’d been in a foul, mean mood. “Fuck.”

  She’d drifted to the end of the corridor past more locked doors. Frosted glass windows the color of dingy teeth. It had been eight years, seven months since she’d been in this northwest corner of the state. More years than that, since she’d been in this very building with her husband, before he’d been her husband, acquiring a marriage license. She’d been too young to be incensed at the absurdity of such a law, such logic, that legal documents are required for being born, being married, dying.

  Mount Olive, New York. A small town south of Lake Erie. When she’d lived here, here had been everywhere. Now she lived elsewhere, here was nowhere.

  Noisy and panting, there came another customer to the county clerk’s office. Yvonne smiled meanly to see this guy—youngish, big, blundering, in white T-shirt and khaki shorts, bald-blond-fuzz head and what looked like mallet hands—squinting at the notice on the door and tugging, hard, at the doorknob. She heard him curse under his breath, “Shit.”

  It was Woody Clark. That big beautiful boy Woody who’d broken her heart.

  “Woody?”

  “Yvonne?”

  They greeted and grabbed at each other. They laughed like demented kids. It was lightning flashing! It was pure chance, therefore innocent. Yvonne would recall afterward almost in disbelief how immediate, how without hesitation they’d been, each of them. Each of them equally. Their dazed delight in each other, that had been wholly unplanned.

  “Jesus, look at you! Gorgeous.”

  Woody was staring. His scrutiny of her was beyond rude: her breasts, her rear, her legs (calves, thighs), even the creamy slice of midriff he couldn’t resist pinching between his big forefinger and thumb.

  Yvonne teetered on her high-heeled sandals, with happiness. She couldn’t keep her hands off Woody, either: his brawny forearm dense with sand-colored hairs, his big rounded jaw where she’d smeared scarlet grease from her mouth.

  “And you. You haven’t changed, either.”

  Woody laughed, this was so hugely untrue. He’d gained weight, he’d lost hair. There was some sort of W-pattern on his sunburnt forehead where wanly curly sand-colored hair was receding. Woody had been vain of his good looks, not that he’d have ever admitted it, and was rubbing his head now with both hands, frantic-funny: “I’m looking like an American dad, which is what I basically am.”

  This remark, seemingly playful, uttered with bared teeth and a goofy grimacing grin, was possibly a warning, Woody would use his kids as human shields in this encounter, or, maybe, it was an unconscious un-premeditated gesture. Yvonne decided not to care. Woody Clark was so luscious! She was so starved! “Woody, my God. I’m crazy for you. I mean, I love you. Just the look of you.” She was laughing at the sick scared look in the guy’s face, remembering how everything had showed in Woody’s face, every quick thought, every fleeting emotion, Woody Clark was direct and guileless as a dog wagging, or not wagging, its tail, or so she’d wished to think. She’d removed her dark glasses—or maybe Woody had removed them—and she was swiping at her eyes quick and deft, just the edges of her fingers, so that her mascara wouldn’t run. Oh, she shouldn’t be saying these things to Woody Clark! Her words had come out unbidden, like bats. She had a quick flash of an antiquarian drawing of, what was it, Pandora’s box, ugly winged things flying out past horror-stricken Pandora.

  Or maybe it was Medusa’s head she saw: horror-stricken Medusa with a head of writhing snakes.

  “Oh, hey. Yvonne.”

  Woody was blushing. His entire face went sunburnt. He was glancing around, guilty-like. But no one was likely to be observing them. His reaction was reflexive: he was recalling their seemingly accidental meetings at their kids’ soccer games, at the hardware store and the drugstore and Grand Union and Barre Mills, the library, Starbucks, The Ice House Grill on Main Street—they’d grab at hands and arms, brush lips against cheeks, no mouth kisses only just smiles like released springs, the two of them fine physical specimens of a clearly superior species, gleaming and glistening, you might say preening with happiness, on public display and yet, maybe, innocent—it was only when they were alone in their secret places, not by chance but by design, that there might be cause for Woody’s guilty look.

  “I’m serious, Woody. I miss you.”

  Woody laughed, uneasy. Because maybe she wasn’t serious. (Was she?) It had been a contention between them, like a badminton birdie they’d batted back and forth, that Yvonne said the most extravagant things and didn’t, couldn’t, mean them; while Boy Scout Woody said only truthful things or at any rate practical/sensible things, and meant them.

  Woody was hugging her now, nearly cracking her vertebrae. He was all sudden vehemence hugging to hurt. “Put your mouth where your money is, baby.” Woody’s dumb jokes, that was what she’d been missing. Nobody she knew now, not one person in her life, made such dumb-ass jokes and expected you to laugh. Her arms came around Woody with iron-maiden swiftness. She wanted Woody to know, to feel, how strong she was, obviously she worked out at a health club, maybe had a personal trainer, lifted (ten-pound) weights, jogged, fast-walked, panted and puffed on the elliptical stairs. She was gratified to feel love handles at Woody’s waist, loose beneath the untucked-in T-shirt and flabbier than she remembered.

  She liked it that Woody was feeling, at her waist and back, not an ounce of flab. Her ribs were right there to be grasped, strummed.

  “Baby, you’ve lost weight. What’re they doing to you over there in what’s-it?”

  As if Woody didn’t know the name of where Neil had been transferred. Where he’d moved his family eight years before.

  “You’re just right, Woody.”

  “I mean, you’re beautiful. Only just a little thin.”

  Woody was actually grasping her waist in both hands as if measuring. She saw the worried-dad look in his face and felt a wave of emotion for him that left her weak. She had to remember that Woody Clark had been too much for her. She’d had to give him up. She’d moved away from Mount Olive and had not thought of Woody since and now, somehow here he was. Hair mostly gone but the baldie-fuzz head seemed to soften his features. Woody still looked young, he was three years younger than Yvonne and she hadn’t ever felt comfortable with that for always, in the matter of men, certainly in the matter of her husband Neil, she’d been the young one. And Woody’s eyes: ridiculous watercolor-blue, Paul Newman–blue, you never saw in actual life, or almo
st never. These eyes shone with ardor, unabashed.

  “Your face, Yvonne. What are you thinking?”

  “What am I thinking? You.”

  “Me? How?” Woody was happy, giving off heat as if he’d been running, panting and stumbling to get to her.

  “How, you know, you’d get excited. I mean, you know, turned on. Like a match tossed into gasoline.” Yvonne made an explosive gesture with hands, mouth.

  “Yeah, well. I was a kid then, practically. Now, maybe not.”

  “Don’t be faux-modest, Woody. It isn’t you.” She was calculating whether she dared mash the heel of her hand against his groin in the khaki shorts. How Woody would react. He could be unpredictable. Just when you were loving him like one of those big clumsy sheepdogs that want only to lick your face and thump their tails, he’d turn on you and say with wounded dignity Don’t ever patronize me.

  “Now what’re you thinking? Your face is fantastically transparent, Yvonne.”

  “If it’s transparent, you tell me what I’m thinking.”

  Woody flashed his left incisor, a snaggle tooth that looked as if it belonged in someone else’s jaw. The laugh-lines around his mouth sharpened like sudden blades. “Is old Woody good for a quick screw? For old times’ sake? Or is it, maybe, too much of a hassle? What’ll he expect from me, afterward? The poor slob.”

  Yvonne blushed. She was laughing, but her face flooded with blood. “Woody, come on. The last thing I’d ever think of you, for Christ’s sake, ‘poor slob.’ You know better.”

  “Hey, I am. A slob. I’m fat.” Woody clutched at his waist, the fleshy knobs. He was ignoring his stomach, that pushed against the T-shirt in a way Yvonne hadn’t seen before, in him. But then, there was his baby-dome of a head. This was new, too.

  Woody was saying, “You, you’re in your own class. There’s only one of you, baby. And maybe I’m wrong, you’re not too thin. I guess it’s healthy, you read about low-calorie diets, the leanest laboratory rats live longer. I mean, ’way underweight rats, anorexic rats, not that the poor bastards have any choice about being starved, but—” Woody could digress for long interludes. He had a mind like a vacuum cleaner, sucking up miscellaneous information, often “scientific,” that was forever on tap. Instead of a post-coital smoke, with Woody Clark you got a post-coital lecture. Yvonne had found this charming and exasperating in about equal measure. Once, she’d relied on Woody to fill her in on news—what to think, be incensed by. Movies, music, even who to vote for. Later, she’d stopped listening. She’d stopped even watching his mouth move. But now she was watching, and she was listening. And she felt a sick, sinking sensation. We could. We could, again.

  “—after this, we could have lunch? There’s this terrific new restaurant on the river, I doubt you know. A decent wine list, improbable as it sounds.”

  Quickly Yvonne said, “I can’t, Woody. I have to get back.”

  “Fuck you do. You don’t.”

  “Woody, I do.” She’d come close to calling him honey. And her tone, too, was familiar as if they’d had this conversation before, more than once. Yvonne was practically in tears, she was so sincere. Her daughter Jill would be waiting for her back home and already she’d lost time, having failed to factor in a one-hour wait for the damned clerk’s office to open. “I’m a chauffeur for Jill right now. She’s had a ‘crisis’ and I need to be reliable for her since of course Neil is otherwise engaged.”

  “God! Jill must be how old?” Woody had heard Jill and not Neil.

  “Fourteen. But a young fourteen.”

  Woody shuddered. He had two sons, Yvonne calculated they were still in middle school. Jill, fourteen going on twelve, was over her head in ninth grade.

  Woody asked about Jill, as he always had. He’d been sweet that way, and seemingly sincere. Yvonne, asking about Woody’s boys, had not always been sincere for she’d been jealous of anyone, even Woody’s children, making emotional demands on him. Only rarely had Yvonne asked after Woody’s wife and yet more rarely, out of tact Yvonne had thought, had Woody asked after Neil.

  Now Woody was asking, as if he’d only just thought of it, why Yvonne was in Mount Olive waiting for the county clerk, and Yvonne hesitated, and said evasively that she had to pick up a death certificate. And Woody’s blue eyes widened. “You do? Jesus, so do I.”

  “You?”

  They stared at each other. This was too strange! There had to be something ominous about it, such a coincidence.

  Woody was frowning and shaking his head muttering he didn’t want to “go into it,” the circumstances of his death certificate. Yvonne felt a clutch of fear, also distaste. Woody (who could read minds, when it suited him) would know that she didn’t want to know who in his life had died, and that annoyed her. Always he’d known more about her than she felt comfortable with his knowing while at the same time, for this was Woody Clark, he’d behaved as if he was the naive one of the two of them, innocent because three years younger.

  “Oh, Woody. Is it—family?” She paused, biting her lower lip. “Not your—father?” In a moment of panic she couldn’t remember whether Woody’s father had died years ago, and she’d heard the news second- or third-hand, or whether—well, she couldn’t remember. In the eight years, seven months since she’d lived in the large white Colonial on Washburn Street her thoughts of Woody Clark had become comfortingly tattered and smudged as a poster on a billboard. Maybe you could see a face on that billboard, and maybe the face was smiling, but you couldn’t recognize the face.

  “No.” Woody was frowning, not very attractive now.

  Yvonne drew back. She could see herself in the very short very white cord skirt and high-heeled sandals stepping backward in her own imprudent footsteps. In damp sand. Don’t go farther, you’ll regret it.

  She said, awkwardly, for her tongue seemed to twist when she lied, “I’m here to pick up a document for tax purposes. My mother’s mother who was, maybe you remember, her stepmom? Not a blood relative of hers, or mine. Oh, she was a nice woman, she was a sweet old lady, but—” Yvonne spoke quickly and carelessly to indicate that her reason for being in Mount Olive on such a mission was not important. It was sad, someone had died, an elderly woman not a blood relative had died, but it wasn’t interesting. Woody’s death certificate was much more interesting, obviously. But they wouldn’t go there.

  “—Caroline? Is it—?”

  The words leapt out. Again it was winged things out of Pandora’s box. Yvonne wanted to clamp her hands over her mouth like a comic-strip character but Woody wasn’t in a mood to be entertained.

  Staring at his feet, enormous silver-gray Nikes with bands of rotting black reflector tape, Woody said nothing. Veins and tendons in his muscled neck visibly pulsed.

  Suddenly Yvonne was remembering, she’d been hearing about Woody’s wife. They’d been separated, and they’d reconciled. And maybe they’d been separated again. And there was some medical problem. Probably breast cancer, for that was the cancer everyone had, everyone female who had cancer, as prostate cancer was male, and for this reason Yvonne who had long resented, been jealous of, hated, disdained and envied Woody Clark’s wife couldn’t be certain now if she’d heard such grim news about the woman because if she had she’d have blanked it out, blocked it like the kind of caller ID Neil had bought for their phones, where you’re spared even knowing who is trying to call you.

  Yvonne swallowed hard. She was frightened suddenly. If Caroline had actually died, was that, somehow, though years later, her fault? Would Woody, unfairly, or fairly, blame her? Or, blaming himself, in his clumsy-blundering-belated way, inadvertently stumble, like a drunk careening across a dance floor, and bring her down with him? Where a minute before he’d been grinning like a high school athlete who’s scored the winning point now Woody was glowering. His mouth was down-turned at both corners. Yvonne thought in dismay Why’d I go there? She could have bitten her lower lip until it bled.